Requiem

The following is one of John Updike's last poems, to be published later this year in a collection to be titled, "Endpoint." Updike died this past week at the age of 76. I'm posting it here both because I find it to be a moving self-memorial by a gifted writer, thus for what it says to me; and for what it lets me say about myself, thus for what it says for me.

It came to me the other day:/ Were I do die, no one would say,/ "Oh, what a shame! So young, so full/ Of promise-- depths unplumbable!"

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes/ Will greet my overdue demise;/ The wide response will be, I know,/ "I thought he died a while ago."

For life's a shabby subterfuge,/ And death is real, and dark, and huge./ The shock of it will register/ Nowhere but where it will occur.